setting forth the thinking is different also.  We despair of reaching the thought, we despair equally of reaching the language.  We can no more bring back their turns of sentence than we can bring back their tournaments.  Montaigne, in his serious moods, has a curiously rich and intricate eloquence; and Bacon’s sentence bends beneath the weight of his thought, like a branch beneath the weight of its fruit.  Bacon seems to have written his essays with Shakspeare’s pen.  There is a certain want of ease about the old writers which has an irresistible charm.  The language flows like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweet recoil—­the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple to the surface, and breaking the whole into babbling music.  There is a ceremoniousness in the mental habits of these ancients.  Their intellectual garniture is picturesque, like the garniture of their bodies.  Their thoughts are courtly and high mannered.  A singular analogy exists between the personal attire of a period and its written style.  The peaked beard, the starched collar, the quilted doublet, have their correspondences in the high sentence and elaborate ornament (worked upon the thought like figures upon tapestry) of Sidney and Spenser.  In Pope’s day men wore rapiers, and their weapons they carried with them into literature, and frequently unsheathed them too.  They knew how to stab to the heart with an epigram.  Style went out with the men who wore knee-breeches and buckles in their shoes.  We write more easily now; but in our easy writing there is ever a taint of flippancy:  our writing is to theirs, what shooting-coat and wide-awake are to doublet and plumed hat.

Montaigne and Bacon are our earliest and greatest essayists, and likeness and unlikeness exist between the men.  Bacon was constitutionally the graver nature.  He writes like one on whom presses the weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on its serious side.  He does not play with it fantastically.  He lives amongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be too familiar.  In the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial.  When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace with spacious entrances, and courts, and banqueting-halls; when he writes on gardens, he speaks of alleys and mounts, waste places and fountains, of a garden “which is indeed prince-like.”  To read over his table of contents, is like reading over a roll of peers’ names.  We have, taking them as they stand, essays treating Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of Atheism, Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of Counsel,—­a book plainly to lie in the closets of statesmen and princes, and designed to nurture the noblest natures.  Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on.  Montaigne was different from all this.  His table of contents reads, in comparison, like a medley, or